WASHINGTON — Growing evidence of far-reaching federal surveillance of the phone records and Internet activity of millions of Americans reignited the debate Thursday about how aggressively the federal government has been using its surveillance powers to protect against terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.

In the latest revelation, The Washington Post found that the National Security Agency and the FBI have been tapping into the servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting a huge cache of audio, video, photograph and e-mail information and other records, according to a document intended for senior NSA officials.

(AP file photo)

The program, called PRISM, has been going on for six years. The NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document, by "collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

A senior government official told The New York Times that the program was targeted at only foreigners abroad.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple said in statements that they do not provide the government with direct access to their records.

The disclosure came a day after The Guardian newspaper in Britain
reported that a Verizon subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, was providing the NSA with "all call detail records" for domestic and international calls by its customers under an order from the federal court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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The Washington Post reported that the order appeared to be part of a surveillance program that began in 2006. Under that program, court orders are routinely renewed every 90 days so the surveillance is not interrupted, an expert told the newspaper and lawmakers confirmed.

On Thursday night, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the disclosure of an Internet surveillance program is "reprehensible" and a document leak about a phone-records program could cause long-lasting and irreversible harm to the nation's ability to respond to threats.

Clapper said he's declassifying some details about the authority used in the phone-records program because he says Americans must know the program's limits.

Those details include that a special court reviews the program every 90 days.

Clapper says the court prohibits the government from indiscriminately sifting through phone data, and queries are only allowed when facts support reasonable suspicion.

The revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations.

Both were reported by Britain's Guardian newspaper, while The Washington Post, relying upon the same presentation, simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official had provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.

The disclosure that a major U.S. phone company has been turning over the records of millions of Americans under a top-secret court order sparked sharply different views on the balance between privacy and national security.

Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said the program had helped thwart at least one attempted terrorist attack in the United States, "possibly saving American lives."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said of the phone-records collecting: "When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we're going to have a real debate."

But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Americans have no cause for concern.

"If you're not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you've got nothing to worry about," he said.

On Thursday, several lawmakers confirmed that the Verizon order was only a glimpse of a broader program of records collection and analysis that dates back seven years. It was not clear whether other telecommunications companies have received similar orders and are turning over the same information about their customers.

The program is lawful, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She added that members of the judiciary and intelligence panels in the House and the Senate had been been briefed on the program.

An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year.

According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Washington Post, "NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM" as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications.

The technology companies, which knowingly participate in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley, according to the document. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: "Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple." PalTalk, while much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as "coming soon."

Government officials declined to comment for this article.

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy.

"They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," the officer said.

Lockheed says object part of 'sensor technology' testing that ended ThursdayWhat the heck is that thing? It's fair to assume that question was on the minds of many people who traveled along Colo. 128 south of Boulder this week if they happened to catch a glimpse of what appeared to be a large, silver projectile perched alongside the highway and pointed north toward town.

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